The new prime minister has declared he wants to end 40 years of neoliberalism. But is he really prepared to be that radical?

In May 2025, when Keir Starmer was still prime minister, Labour politicians, campaigners and journalists gathered at the Ministry of Sound in London to watch a series of panel talks and presentations illuminated by the lucid glow of club lights. The day-long event was organised by a campaign group called Compass, and the subjects included child poverty, the Murdoch-owned media and the rise of the radical right.

“We felt as though the Labour government was failing, and needed to be pulled into the 21st century,” Neal Lawson, the founder of Compass, told me. The Starmer government’s support for the Conservatives’ two-child benefit cap, its equivocating stance on Gaza and its emulation of far-right rhetoric – crystallised in a speech on immigration, during which the prime minister suggested Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers” – were causing Labour supporters to rapidly desert their party. “The Starmer project was so obviously intellectually bankrupt. He was personally so disinterested in ideas and big thinking that I thought, this is never going to fly,” Lawson said.

This trip into the celeb couple’s Cheshire mansion is nowhere as real as they’d like you to believe. But their self-deprecation is hard not to enjoy

‘There are two obvious problems here, the first being that the Rooneys’ lives feel like fiction: he was a generational sporting talent, a one-in-a-million player whose success has bought him and Coleen a ridiculous Cheshire mansion with a cinema, indoor pool and adjacent football pitch. To get back to the road you have to drive over a bridge across a lake. As we join them, Coleen is working out how to capitalise on a recent appearance on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, while Wayne is plotting an uptick in his media appearances that he hopes will make him a regular on Match of the Day. Technically, the Rooneys exist on our Earth, but – as they both admit, recalling their working-class childhoods in Croxteth, Liverpool – they have left ordinary life behind.

Even if we accept that they are to some extent real people, the further problem is that if you want to get to know someone, watching a behind-the-scenes “at home with” reality show is not the way to do it. This is an established format that was initially shaped by the Kardashians and has now evolved to fit the specific needs of retired British sportsmen looking to relaunch themselves as media personalities. By design, the shows are anything but realistic, instead offering a carefully calibrated blend of fantastic luxury that viewers can escape into, and domestic rituals – breakfast, the school run – offered up in a half-hearted attempt to show that really, these famous folk are just like us.

A conflict that began with tanks and then artillery is now pivoting around a new generation of drones focused on military, industrial, economic and civilian targets

Finally, in the dead of night, the threat above has passed. The rain has eased and the Ukrainian drones are ready, prepared by a ground crew shrouded in hard-to-detect green and red lights. A small succession of Ukrainian Fire Point FP-2 craft, miniature monoplanes with a 6-metre wingspan and more than 100kg of explosive, line up for an attack mission into occupied Luhansk, over 200 miles away.

The drone’s main piston engine is a familiar scooter’s buzz, but its launch booster is something else. The jet sound reverberates, almost painfully. A burst of fire lurches into the distance, the last of which signifies it is time for Ukraine’s 413 Raid drone regiment to pack and go.

The launch of an FP-2 drone during the mission into occupied Luhansk

In the last 15 years, she has gone from respected actor to stratospheric, garlanded star. Now she is back on TV as a chic sleuth in a racy car – despite being terrible at guessing whodunnit

It is high summer and, while Lesley Manville may be suffering a bit with hay fever and the heat (“I’m so white, all I do is burn”), she doesn’t do wilting. Soon to head outside to tend to the ailing garden of her London home, she is enjoying a rare period of rest after six almost unbroken months of Oedipus on Broadway and then Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National. She keeps, incidentally, the Tony she won for playing Jocasta in Oedipus on a shelf by the computer, “next to its friend, Larry Olivier” – an Olivier awarded for the same role.

“You don’t go into a job thinking about awards,” she says, before grinning conspiratorially. “Listen, you don’t say to an Olympian, ‘Oh, is it OK that you didn’t win?’ Yes, you like to win!”

The earl on his globally lauded eulogy for Diana, King Charles’s sausage fingers and toxic Raine, topped off with a lavish sprinkling of adverbs

Cheers were heard up and down the land. Halley’s comet made an unscheduled appearance in the ethereal night sky. In very heaven, angelic choirs rang out. A saviour had been born. A light to lighten the world. But enough about me. For this paragraph at least.

In my universally acclaimed funeral address, I aimed to speak for my sister. The real Diana. For only I truly knew her. She had the heart of a lion. And I had a glut of cliches. Yet when Diana had swept so triumphantly into the arena of royal life, I was but a callow youth awash with hormones and gripped by the self-centredness of adolescence. Nothing much has changed. Yet I know, with all my heart, that Diana would have wanted me to tell our story.

Young men punched in the street, mosques attacked: Britain badly needs an anti-racist uprising. Let 70s Asian youth movements provide the inspiration

There it was: a pool of blood spreading across the pavement. A section of the high street had been cordoned off and a uniformed police officer gestured for bystanders to move along. It was the long hot summer of 1976, and a racist murder had stunned Southall in west London.

“What has happened here, officers?” asked Suresh Grover, then a curious 22-year-old, later to be widely known as a leading racial justice activist. “Go away, it’s just Indian blood,” was the response. Grover was soon to learn that 18-year-old Gurdip Singh Chaggar, an engineering student, had been stabbed to death by racist thugs the night before.

El Niño poses critical threat to nations’ defences, says Ed Miliband in presentation to global foreign ministers

The UK has warned countries around the world that the climate and nature crises and the coming El Niño threaten their national security and defence, presenting foreign ministries with the findings of an explosive report suppressed under Keir Starmer.

Ed Miliband, the UK’s foreign secretary, made a presentation to the foreign ministers of the EU as well as Kenya and other countries on Wednesday night at a private meeting during the UN general assembly in New York, based on the report by the UK’s spy chiefs that found the collapse of natural systems around the world would lead to conflict, migration and food shortages.

US president to give red-carpet treatment to Chinese counterpart despite tensions over AI development

• Trump greets Xi – live updates

• AI, trade, Taiwan and climate: what will and won’t be on agenda at Trump-Xi summit

Donald Trump welcomed Xi Jinping on Wednesday evening, taking the unusual step of greeting the Chinese leader on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews to kick off his state visit to Washington.

Xi’s plane was met with a lavish arrival ceremony that included a 100ft long red carpet flanked by US service members, a military flyover by two B-1 bombers and a presentation of the flags and national anthems of both countries. US presidents typically welcome foreign leaders at the White House, but Trump and first lady Melania Trump traveled to the the military base in Maryland, just outside Washington, to personally shake Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan’s hands upon their arrival in the US.

Approach to treating high blood pressure ‘not fit for purpose’, say researchers, with 59% of cases undiagnosed

Only half of people being treated by a GP for high blood pressure in England have it under control, and millions more are completely unaware they have the “silent killer” condition, research reveals.

Most people with hypertension (59%) are in the dark and undiagnosed, raising their risk of stroke, heart attack and early death, according to the largest ever study of its kind.

Prime minister says measure is discriminatory when fans of other sports are not similarly restricted

Andy Burnham has signalled he may lift the ban on drinking alcohol in the stands at football matches, suggesting it is “unfair” for fans to be singled out when it is permitted for other sports.

The prime minister, a committed Everton fan who still attends matches, said there was a case for trialling an end to the ban to bring football in line with rugby and cricket.